by Martin Moran
I’d really thought that life would become lucid the moment I entered the great university. I thought that everything I’d secretly struggled with in high school would melt away as I embarked on this grown-up life in a brand-new state. I’d see to it. I had, in fact, forced myself to visit a Denver psychiatrist just before leaving for college. Sitting there in his office amid the Tinkertoys and teddy bears of his trade, I’d made myself express the affliction I feared was growing in me, the problem I wanted to conquer—Homosexuality. He sat in his khaki pants, unbuttoned cardigan, and red bow tie, he sat there like Mr. Rogers in his cute psychoanalytic neighborhood, and gently explained how the brain is like a switchboard. He reminded me that I was, indeed, the “operator” and, as a disciplined young man, it was my task to get the girl messages through. To make the right bulbs light up.
I’d left there all circuits smoking, thinking him an idiot, but the word discipline rang in my head and I sat down and reaffirmed, again and again, the paradigm that had grown in my mind. The strict plan that I would take with me to university: poli-sci, pre-law, lawyer, Catholic husband, father, senator, and, finally, happiness. I’d be good. And rich. I’d make my mother proud. I’d will it so.
But forces stronger than will were at work. Between classes, my feet kept taking me away from studies and off to auditions. First it was the all-school musical Gaieties! followed soon after by the dorm’s Shakespeare production. I landed a lead in Gaieties! and then played Feste in Twelfth Night. I fled campus as often as I could and went to the theater in San Francisco. I sat in the balcony of the Geary Theater, thrilled beyond measure to see men and women playing Shaw and Chekhov and Stoppard. Playing for a living! Weekends I visited my high school pal, Ken, who was at Berkeley. These bayside cities were liberating and exotic, especially in comparison to lily-white Palo Alto. Ken and I went to People’s Park, saw women there dancing topless, smoking joints. One night I ventured on my own to the Castro district in San Francisco. I saw guys (so many of them!) spilling out of doors and onto the front stoops of gay bars. Tank tops and mustaches moving to an earthshaking beat. I observed from across the street, repelled and fascinated by what seemed an impossible, sinful mirage. There were gay coffee shops and galleries and bookstores. One Sunday when I went to my first opera, La Gioconda, I saw a guy on the steps of city hall wearing a button that said, I AM A COCKSUCKER, and holding a sign: WE ARE EVERYWHERE. In utter panic I ran around the corner. Not here, not here, not me! my switchboard was shrieking. How sad their gay ghetto, I thought, how embarrassing their lives. Even that lanky politician, the goofy guy on TV, Harvey Milk. Even he, whose courage somehow thrilled me, embarrassed me.
On the 27th of that November, Harvey Milk was murdered, along with Mayor Moscone. I sat vigil in my dorm room, a storm of sadness and indignation and confusion raging through me. I don’t recall saying one word to anyone ever about the tragedy. About all the feelings surrounding the terrible event unfolding not thirty miles from campus. Sadly, I did not want to reveal even the slightest connection to those people in the streets. Those fags who’d lost their brave leader and were daring to rise up in outrage.
I meant to buckle down into my freshman track, but I was continually drawn to the city, to these arty, sexy, urban places, even as every fiber of me was fighting it. I walked that idyllic campus, moving between mad bouts of despair and ecstatic bursts of defiance. Despair that I was still battling these “dark” forces within and yet a stubborn sense that my desires had to somehow be good. They were mine and they were real and maybe they were pointing the way toward a life, toward an authentic self that had little to do with this technocratic school. That had not one thing to do with “lawyer” or “marriage” or “church.”
In the space of one evening late that first semester, a single event broke the floodgates and cleared the path.
It was a cool autumn night a few weeks after I’d finished playing Feste. An elder classman recognized me at the library and stopped me to say hello and to compliment me on my performances. I recognized him. He was a star athlete. His name was Dan and he was dazzling. He was extremely popular and clever. He was sometimes involved in creating the halftime antics at the football games, which had made the Stanford Marching Band so famous. He asked me over to his off-campus digs for drinks. Sure, I said. Later that night, sitting on the edge of his queen-size bed, we got stoned. We talked quietly of our aspirations. Though he was studying medicine, he wanted to be a musician, guitar, and I confessed that I couldn’t stop thinking about being an actor. That I felt a passion for the stage and was beginning to think I didn’t belong at Stanford. That I should look for other schools.
He touched my knee and seven thousand volts shot through me, switchboard blown. “You should,” he said. “You could be a professional. You’re absolutely dynamite.”
The light in his brown eyes, the Hawaiian dope, his fingers brushing my dungarees, I was a goner. His room was tiny. We were knee to knee. I was aware, through the warm hum of THC, that I wanted one thing in the world more than any other. To kiss him. I wanted to hold him and be held. It was clear as clear as anything I’d ever known. Solid and real and vibrant and fabulous. His hand moved up my leg—the sky on the Fourth of July—and written in lights across the universe, across the inside of my buttoned-up head and the gooseflesh of my arms, there it was: Hello, you want this. Here it is.
It felt as shocking as it did inevitable.
Awkwardly, shyly, the star athlete and I managed to get horizontal. The warmth of this boy near my own age, near my own body, was some kind of beautiful, breathing truth. It was like holding (after all those high school years of denial, after all the awkward dating of girls) my future. God, here he was in my arms, this smart and funny and talented guy and I liked him. I really liked him.
It was wildly erotic and frustratingly chaste. I wanted more but couldn’t even bring myself to say a word, much less kiss him. Lying right there next to me, he’d suddenly gone away. Disappeared. I could feel it. He was more afraid, it seemed, than even I. We’d taken off our shirts but still wore pants and I was holding on for dear life and wondering just what (everything, I hoped) would happen next. If there might be love here, if we’d sleep together and make scrambled eggs in the morning, if maybe he felt the same, when, with a jolt, he jumped up.
“It’s late, you’d better go.”
“Sure,” I said, my face burning as I buttoned my shirt. We shook hands. I thanked him for the dope and the chat and went out into the dawn, knowing somehow (and I was right) that this would be the last time I’d ever hang out with him.
As I wandered through prettified Palo Alto, my belly burned with a pang I’d not experienced before. A powerful push, a vivid ache, at the base of my pubic bone. And it occurred to me exactly what it was. I wanted to have made love with him and the hurt was that it hadn’t happened. The simple fact of it cracked open inside of me, cracked me across the head, and I paused there on Palm Drive and said it out loud. Get over yourself, for chrissake. You’re gay! Deal with it. And when I reached campus I sat on the cement wall near the post office in a kind of trance. The sun was just rising and it seemed the earth had shifted on its axis. The position and quality of light, the rhythmic hiss of the morning sprinklers, the slow sway of the eucalyptus trees, all of it was strange and vivid and alive and new with what I’d finally admitted. I hadn’t slept, I may still have been stoned, but everything was lucid. I sat there neither happy nor sad but utterly determined to harness the force of what I felt. To make adult sense of it. I stared at the maze of post office boxes, at the empty plaza, and a clear and tender thought came up to surprise me. Came up from the deep and fell out of my mouth: He didn’t make you this way, you know. Bob didn’t do it. This is who you are.
My plane landed at Stapleton International for Christmas break, and though my stomach was in knots, I plunged right in. My sister, Chris, was first. She took me to McDonald’s and I told her my news. She listened and said, ever so calmly, that she thought I mig
ht be an actor and was always sure I was gay. “What?” I asked, incredulous. “Marty,” she said as she ate another greasy fry, “you never walked, you always bounced.”
Mom, I knew, would be trickiest.
It was early evening, a few nights after Christmas. I sat at my desk, down in my old bedroom, next to the cheery yellow bunk bed, over the blinding orange carpet. I was on my swivel stool, just like one of those seats you can spin on at the counter of a coffee shop. Mom came in and sat at the foot of my bed, across from the desk. We were both silent. I’d already shared with her my disappointment with Stanford, my intention to find another school with a theater program. This had caused mild protest, heightened anxiety. What about your scholarship? Why not finish out college? A degree is so important these days. And then there was just the basic divorced family-holiday stress—whose house to go to when, to cover all bases, keep everyone happy. Tension was high, everyone exhausted.
“Any thoughts on what you might want to do for your birthday?” Mom asked, pulling pieces of invisible lint off the folded laundry in her lap. “If you want to invite a few friends, I’ll make some dinner.”
“Thanks, Mom. That sounds good.” I felt weak, sick in the stomach. I swiveled away toward my desk, pretended to write something. “I’ll think of who to call . . . maybe Jan and Cynthia and Mike and Kelly, if they’re around and—” I knew, suddenly, that it was the moment. I turned to face her. Her hands were resting on the T-shirts and underwear in her lap, my Fruit of the Loom. “I have something I need to tell you,” I said.
Instantly, her eyes hardened. Grave, panicked. She’d been stoic when I’d discussed the acting thing. Now I watched her chest rise as if readying for a fight, then slump again. Why did I know she knew exactly what was in the air? Ever since I stepped off the plane, the strain between us had been palpable. I had the words planned, they were simple, but I needed a way in, a beginning, and it eluded me.
“Ummm . . . ummm . . . Mom . . .”
It came like a death rattle out of a parched throat. “You’re going to tell me that you’re homosexual, aren’t you?”
Oh my God, they were right, mothers do always know.
I managed a timid nod, only vaguely aware of the sharp disappointment I felt at being robbed of the chance to say it for myself. I watched the blood, the life go right out of her. She was whispering, shaking her head: “I knew it. I knew it.” Her hands went to her face and then, as if running toward an emergency, she gripped the laundry and fled the room.
I was home for one more terrible week. We said not a word to each other. For the first three days her face was swollen with grief. I understood—felt the ache of guilt—that she felt guilty. She was flogging herself with Freud, I knew it. “Aggressive Mother, Passive Father.” I’d heard her talk about it before, in general, in relation to other people, but now I was her own clinical classic, a monster she’d created.
Two evenings before I was to return to Stanford, Mom was at the sink rinsing the dinner dishes. She was wearing her long red nightgown, not unlike something the bishop wears to High Mass. She had on her yellow rubber gloves, the ones she wore to protect her hands and nails as she cleaned the kitchen. I was sitting at the table when, suddenly, there was the terrible sound of cutlery crashing into the sink. I turned to find her bloodshot eyes right on me, her latexed arms held aloft as if she were a surgeon waiting to be handed her scalpel. Water and bits of tuna dripped from her elbows. She raised her wrists higher, as if in supplication to the brutal gods of fate, and spat out three words which she and I would recall many years later over cocktails, through stitches of laughter. She looked at her nineteen-year-old son and with all the anguish of an empress losing her grip, breathing her last, cried out:
“Et tu, Brute?”
I just stared, we both did, two drama queens at a standstill, playing the end of a bad scene. After the appropriate beats of silence, she went back to the dishes and I exited to my room. Next morning, I was on a plane back to California, not to return to Denver for another two years.
I waited a few more months before dropping the bomb on Dad when he and his new wife came for a visit to Palo Alto. (He’d remarried during my senior year of high school, a woman he’d met in his apartment complex.) I was terrified to speak, and struggled with the notion that, with him, perhaps everything was best left unsaid. But I also felt a determination to get it over with; I knew that he was likely (if he hadn’t already) to get the scoop from someone else, and I wanted him to hear it from me.
It was a warm night. He and I went outside and leaned against a parked car. Eucalyptus in the air, stars in the sky. “Dad, I want to tell you . . . I think there may just be a distinct possibility that I’m essentially . . . sort of . . . a homosexual.”
He looked down, I remember, and swirled his cocktail, stared at the cubes circling there like little frozen fish. He looked up then at the chunk of heaven hanging above my fancy college campus and said: “Well . . . there are things about me you don’t like.”
For some stretch of magical minutes I actually felt overjoyed. That wasn’t such an awful response, I thought, gazing, as he did, skyward. This is going to be OK. Neither of us have dropped dead. He seemed calm and I read this as acceptance, even closeness. It was certainly better than the disaster I’d experienced with Mom.
We walked around the block. The cool California air was soothing. Peace reigned. We shook hands, said a solemn goodnight, and I headed back to my dorm ecstatic, mission accomplished.
The next afternoon I was to meet Dad and his wife in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I took the train in after classes. The entire ride there and then walking the steep and narrow streets, I felt deliriously happy. I was looking forward to seeing him, being together in the light of this new understanding. I caught sight of them waiting on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and I broke into a run and threw my arms around my father. He clutched. His body was like a stone. With his arms glued to his sides, he muttered something about his cigarette: “Careful . . . watch it.” He tossed it from his fingers, looked down the street. His eyes, shot through with blood, would not meet mine. He couldn’t disguise his disgust, his disappointment. What emanated from him was utterly animal, involuntary. I’d read the books. I understood immediately that he needed time, space. That what I’d said had sunk in overnight and was poisoning him. I felt for him even as it devastated me. All the more because I could see he couldn’t help it. He had no way, no vocabulary, for coping with the son in front of him. It suddenly occurred to me that what had passed between us the night before had been eased by alcohol. It wasn’t yet five, he hadn’t had a cocktail. Go easy, I told myself. We stood there in the bustling street, frozen and despondent. It was as if, I remember thinking, Everest had risen up between us and someone had commanded him to strap on his boots and climb up to meet me. And everything in his face, in his slumped frame, said, I just can’t. This I cannot do.
“I think the restaurant’s this way,” his wife muttered, flicking her Virginia Slim into the gutter.
At our miserable Chinese dinner he and his wife got miserably drunk. At one point she blurted: “I don’t understand how you could do such a thing to your little brother and sister—they looked up to you, you know.”
When, some time later, I finally reached my sister Chris on the phone, I burst into tears telling her what had transpired. She tried to calm me, told me to give Dad time. “You know, he thinks that Malo guy did it to you. Made you gay.”
“Christ . . . how much does he know?”
Somewhere along the way I’d shared a bit of the story with Chris and, as will happen (as she now informed me), she’d talked to Dad about it.
“What did you tell him?” I demanded.
“Just a little. Marty, after a point it’s not that hard to put it together. The rumors about Bob were around. It was in the paper when he got arrested. I guess Dad had suspicions. I don’t know. Put stuff together.”
“He never said anything.”
“Of course not.”
“Bob had nothing to do with this! This is a separate thing. This is part of who I am. It has nothing to do with what happened then. This is who I am, I’m telling you. I finally know that to be true! It’s part of me . . . no one made me this way.”
“I know, I know, be patient. Just give them time.”
“There isn’t enough time in this life.”
That summer, I got a job at Disneyland as an “All-American College Singer and Dancer.” Five shows a day in the frighteningly fascist Land of Tomorrow. My first professional paycheck. The following year, I left Palo Alto to attend theater school and, upon graduating, found my way to New York.
It was the winter of ‘82. Short on cash, long on hope, I believed that, no matter how crazy or hard it seemed, there was no going back. And one rainy Wednesday after the matinee crowds had spilled from the Broadway theaters, I served a bowl of soup to our regular customer, the actress Kathy Bates, at Joe Allen’s Restaurant, and she looked up at me and said, “You know, Marty, you’re going to make it. It will take the head of a bullet and the heart of a child, but be patient. All of this, the whole shebang, it takes sacrifice. It takes a mountain of patience.”
She smiled, and I thanked her, and that night, instead of taking the subway when I got off work, I walked all the way downtown through Chelsea and the Village. All the way down to the Broome Street loft. I walked knowing this was it. I was head over heels for Manhattan.
5
MEN.
It is there above the door, carved in white marble, in bold classical script. Like a commandment. So I enter.
I’m the older one. At twenty-two my body is finished finding its height. He couldn’t be more than fifteen—the young man at the urinal—sixteen, perhaps, with his long, skinny frame and steel-rimmed glasses. In raggedy cutoffs and leather sandals, he looks the lost waif. I glance about for a parent, but he seems to belong to no one.